Albert Hofman


Albert Hofman is a Dutch clinical epidemiologist. He is currently the Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Public Health and the chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Early life and education

Hofman was born in 1951 in Hardenberg, The Netherlands. He attended medical school at the University of Groningen and graduated in 1976 with his MD. He went on to complete a second research fellowship within the department of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1982. He then completed his PhD at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in 1983.
His research fellowship was completed within the department of community medicine at the University of Groningen, 1975; and his clinical residencies were completed in the departments of internal medicine at the Academic Hospitals Groningen and Leiden in 1977.

Career

In 1981 he became an assistant professor at Erasmus University Medical School, Rotterdam; he was promoted to associate professor in 1984, and to full professor in 1988. In 1988 he became chairman of the department of epidemiology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands, in which he served until 2016. He also served as the science director of the graduate school of the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences since its inception in 1992 to 2015. Hofman has served as the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Epidemiology since 2000.
Hofman is the initiator and principal investigator of two population-based, prospective cohort studies in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands: the Rotterdam Study and the Generation R study. Data collection for these studies started in 1990 and 2002, respectively. These cohort studies both target multiple common diseases, have very extensive and state-of-the-art assessments of the putative determinants of these diseases, and employ many new technologies not previously applied to epidemiologic population studies.
The study of multiple outcomes, in particular of neurological, cardiovascular and endocrine diseases, has enabled the investigation of the interrelations of diseases, and thereby of the co-morbidity and co-etiology of various diseases with a large population burden. This has made the findings in these studies generally useful for public health purposes, as well as for clinical medicine.
These studies included the first use of genome-wide assessment and large-scale imaging of whole cohorts in epidemiological studies. The Rotterdam Study was one of the five founding cohorts of the very productive CHARGE consortium which has performed many successful genome-wide association studies that have found a large number of genes associated with common diseases. The Rotterdam Study has also pioneered new population imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging since 1995.
In addition to contributing to over 2,000 publications during his career, he is also the faculty director of the clinical epidemiology program within the department of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School.

Honors and distinctions